He's written two novels. If you can call them novels. Maybe you'd prefer to call
them works of philosophy, thinly—very thinly—disguised as fiction. Or perhaps you'd.... more

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

COMMENTARY

Strangest bestseller

Two kinds of people are apt to hate Zen and the Art of Motorcycle
Maintenance: advanced philosophy majors and advanced novel readers.

As a novel, Zen is terrible. Virtually no narrative, cardboard
characters, and generally incompetent writing. But, as the reader very
quickly discovers, this really isn't meant to be a piece of fiction in the
usual contemporary sense. Rather the novel form is used as a platform to present
philosophical ideas. Going back perhaps to before the novel
form, say to Plato presenting his arguments to the wider public through
dialogues.

Except Robert Pirsig's argument in Zen is almost
exclusively with himself. In every chapter the central character (himself)
stops the story of his motorcycle trip through the American Midwest with
his son, usually after only a page or so, to soliloquize at great length about how he developed his philosophy of
"Quality".

There is some story potential in the introduction of a mysterious
character Phaedrus, whose memory arises in the narrator's mind, but this
turns out to be nothing more than Pirsig himself again—in a persona he had
taken on before a mental breakdown some years earlier. Then even the
dramatic possibilities of this (a suppressed personality trying to take
over the new "cured" one? a schizophrenic coming to terms with reality?)
are spent. It becomes apparent Phaedrus is resurrected only as a
mouthpiece for Pirsig's philosophical views.

And how about those ideas?

Every now and then in book publishing history, a "novel" thin
on literary values but heavy on a seemingly new message—usually of a
heart-warming, stop-and-smell-the-roses nature—captures the public's fancy
in a big way. A particularly lightweight example from the same era is
1970's Jonathan Livingston Seagull.

But Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, subtitled An
Inquiry into Values, is a strange bestseller in this category. For the
thought presented by Pirsig/Phaedrus is actually rather heavy-duty. It's the
kind of material you might actually study in undergraduate philosophy
classes. In fact, the novel has become required reading in some
undergraduate university programs. Several chapters of Zen do little more than
gloss the views of ancient Greeks and early modern philosophers like
Hume and Kant.

This in itself is not a bad thing. At one time, the novel form
was thought to bring together all aspects of writing, incorporating
broader, complex ideas into creative writing in a way that short stories
and poetry could not. Zen may represent a return to that ideal. The
trouble though is that Pirsig goes
on to present himself as having solved all the major philosophical
questions raised through his discovery of Quality as a kind of indefinable source
of all ideas and things. Worse, the arguments he presents for this
theory-of-everything are so weak they could be seen through by those same
undergraduate students by the time they get to their sophomore or junior
year.

In the end, recognizing the contradictions into which he falls, Pirsig
retreats into mysticism, declaiming the truth of his supposed discoveries
regardless of their failures.

His long-awaited
sequel Lila: An Inquiry into Morals (1991), which supposedly
reorganizes the material into a more methodical "Metaphysics of
Quality", suffers the same weakness.

Nonetheless, countless readers claim to
have found life-changing insight in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. I suspect they are reading
their own insights into this confused book. Which, admittedly, sounds like the kind of
thing Pirsig would say.